Bücher der Reihe Mediated Fictions

The rapid development of the TV series in the twenty-first century has resulted in an emergence of new aesthetic, cultural, and social trends. The development has influenced both the mainstream of popular culture and reception practices of audiences across nations and platforms. This book observes how the means employed in key contemporary TV series texts and a specific thematic variety have promoted new reception styles and redefined conventional interpretive practices. The authors analyze a variety of series released since 2000 to discuss historical (dis)continuities of genres and conventions, and observe how interpretive competences promoted by the rhetoric of contemporary TV series result from, and are polemical with, the conventions of visual and verbal cultures of preceding decades.

The book analyses the contemporary academic mystery novel through the lenses of the classical detective novel and the university novel. The authors of the analysed mysteries are scholars who invent apparently insoluble criminal conundrums to highlight the problems haunting the higher education system, such as plagiarism or fight for tenure.

This study focuses on emblematic intertextual strategies in contemporary British fiction. Analysing the process of adaptation, pastiche, transworld identity and historiographic metafiction, the book demonstrates how the intertextual impulse can be inscribed not only in the structure and semantics of a given text but also in the narrative plane.

The study focuses on the problem of spatiality in literature. Organized around three defining problems - spatial topoi, genres and methods - the volume gives the reader a good insight into a range of approaches to contemporary research on literary space in poetry, drama and fiction.

This book is a cognitive-poetic study of the seven novels of Charles Williams (1886-1945). The author approaches the multidimensional narratives with reference to cognitive phenomena and mechanisms such as the figure-ground organization, conceptual metaphors, conceptual blending, image schemata, scripts, cognitive deixis, and empathy.

The book focuses on the uncanny in the domestic space of Elizabeth Bowen's fiction. Providing a psychoanalytic reading of selected works it aims to examine the image of the house in Bowen's prose and to analyse its uncanniness in relation to the characters' identity.

This book analyses the poetry of Ciaran Carson, a Northern-Irish writer. In particular, it discusses the tension between orality and textuality. The author shows how it operates in Carson's major subjects: memory, city and history. Finally, the limits of this dialectic are sketched from an epistemological and metaphysical perspective.

The book focuses on the category of character in fiction. It analyses characters in individual texts by authors ranging from Conrad to Coetzee considered from rhetorical, structural, functional and cognitive perspectives; in genre contexts from utopia and fantasy to campus fiction; and in extra-textual contexts from intertextuality to autobiography.

The volume explores intersections between the traditional utopian discourse and recent media: music, comics, TV series, feature films, documentaries, fan fiction, computer games and web projects. It shows the variety of forms of expression of utopian impulses and their relocation and reinterpretation in the contemporary culture of convergence.

Monika Kocot's book on Edwin Morgan's literary achievement, both poetry and drama, foregrounds the themes of cultural transgression, dialogism of the author's creative design, and various, potentially subversive games of sense creation: "verbivocovisual" constellations, mythopoetic "writings-through," and intersemiotic translations.